The 10 Best Standoffs in Movie (and TV) History

Here at Esquire, we love scenes. One of the most enduring is, of course, the standoff. Herein, some undeniable (and completely biased) favorites. Plus: A writer for The Wire on creating a scene for Omar.

Why We'll Always Remember Adam Goldberg: The Fights

Why We'll Always Remember Adam Goldberg: The Fights

The historian Shelby Steele made himself famous when he explained why the North has generally forgotten the Civil War and the South is still obsessed with it: You always remember the fight you lost.

Steele was right. And for proof of his contention look no further than the film career of Adam Goldberg. He's a fine character actor who brings a self-questioning intensity to his portrayals of neurotic Jewish intellectuals. But his entire career is a footnote to the two fights he has had onscreen.

They are both unforgettable, because he loses both.

The first is from Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater's great and hauntingly accurate evocation of high-school life in the seventies. Goldberg plays Mike, a brainy boy seeking to become a man of action — "I wanna dance!" he tells his friends, on their way to the big end-of-year party under the Moon Tower. It's the kind of party he's never been invited to, and he goes as a kind of disinterested observer — "someone's tokin' some reefer" — until the someone toking the reefer turns out to be Clint, seen earlier challenging Matthew McConaughey to a drag race. Clint's a throwback, a greaser who would have been at home in American Graffiti but for his love of weed: "So I'm blazin' with my friends, I'm a fuckin' pothead. What's it to you?" The brainy boy who wants to be a man of action finally meets a man of action, and the man of action takes off his shirt and, with a shove, nearly puts the brainy boy on his ass, ending the confrontation with the classic kiss-off: "I only came here to do two things: kick ass and drink some beer... Looks like we're almost outta beer."

If you've seen the movie, and I presume you have, I don't have to tell you that Mike spends the rest of the party deciding whether or not to take action against Clint — and that when he does, the fight doesn't go the way he figured it would go, which makes it the most realistic fistfight in cinematic history. Mike plans for the fight to end quickly — "Most fights in places like this never get past a punch or two before they're broken up, know what I'm saying?" But the jocks who enforce the boundaries of the battle have no interest in breaking it up; they want to see someone get his ass kicked, and that's what happens. Mike cold-cocks Clint; then Clint gets up, pins him down, and mercilessly beats the shit out of him. The fight ends with Mike helplessly calling Clint a fascist, and then weeping in his best friend's arms.

The question, however, is not whether he loses the fight; the question is whether losing the fight makes him a loser. One of the things that has always surprised me when I talk to people about Dazed and Confused is the prevailing conviction that it does — that Mike gets what's coming to him when he takes on the "dominant male monkey motherfucker," and ends up what he fears turning into: humiliated, "a little ineffectual nothing." But that's not it, at all. Mike gets exactly what he wants out of the fight. He's triumphant because he triumphs over himself; he acts, and on the way home he even starts fashioning his loss into legend: "I mean, you wouldn't say that I got my ass kicked..."

Five years later, Goldberg gets into another fight, and this time loses more comprehensively. In Saving Private Ryan, he plays Private Mellish, and goes hand-to-hand with a German soldier on the second floor of a bombed-out building. Both men's lives are on the line, but the scene doesn't even belong to Goldberg; it belongs to Jeremy Davies, who plays Upham, a translator cowering on the steps. Upham has a gun, and a belt of ammunition; he has the power to save Mellish. Instead, he is paralyzed by fear, and the scene becomes almost unbearable to watch and especially to listen to. Goldberg's fight in Private Ryan is to mortal combat what his fistfight in Dazed and Confused is to schoolyard brawls; it is utterly realistic, because of its horrible intimacy. Mellish is not unarmed; he has a bayonet, and the bayonet becomes the fulcrum of the battle. He has it within inches of the German's flesh, but the German is physically stronger than he is, and turns it against him, in agonizingly slow increments. Goldberg even has a chance to try bargaining, as the point of the blade makes its way to his solar plexus; indeed, when he says, "Listen to me, stop!" he sounds recognizably like Mike in Dazed and Confused. But he might as well be bargaing with death itself, and his submission, when it comes, is almost sexual, with the German soldier whispering tenderly to him as he is penetrated, and the bayonet finds its way slowly and inevitably home.

The tears, this time, belong to Jeremy Davies, when the German who has just dispatched Mellish walks down the stairs and doesn't even think enough of him to try killing him. Upham is not just a coward; he is a non-person, which is exactly what Mike in Dazed and Confused dreaded becoming. At the end of Dazed and Confused, you figure that Adam Goldberg's vanquished character is going to be okay; he might even grow up to become Adam Goldberg. But you can't imagine the lifetime of hell in store for Upham. You would rather be Melish, his lifeless eyes wide open on the landing. That's because the message of Adam Goldberg's two losing battles is not Shelby Steele's — it's not that you always remember the fight you lost. It's that you always remember the fight you ducked or ran away from. The fight that never happened. —Tom Junod

The Godfather

The Godfather

The scene in which Sonny beats the living shit out of Carlo on the street doesn't look like much of standoff; it looks more like a thrashing, one of the most sustained thrashings in cinema. But the beauty of The Godfather is how subtly the machinery of power is hidden in plain sight. Carlo getting beaten is actually Carlo winning, preparing his revenge against the family for their decision to sideline him and leading to Sonny's murder. The amazing thing about that scene is that only a viewer as careful as Michael Corleone would notice the intricate Machiavellianism of what's really going on. Michael doesn't do standoffs of course. He kills without confrontation. It's also a great reminder of the actual power of the Corleones. Up to that point in the movie, you can pretend that they're just a powerful family. That scene shows that they're the kind of family that can beat someone on the street and everybody just watches. —Stephen Marche